Fathers figure heavily in this film set in Berlin in 2001. A neophyte public defender, Leinen catches what becomes the case of the decade: the assassination-style killing of a prominent businessman. The defendant, Fabrizio Collini (Italian actor Franco Nero in a stunning performance), neither admits nor denies the crime: he won’t speak. Moreover, the victim, Hans Meyer, is someone Leinen has known all his life—a father figure, in fact. The Italian-born Collini’s case holds a mystery that Leinen—as a son, even an adopted son, of Germany’s wartime generation—is driven to pursue. It takes him to a Tuscan village and a day in 1944 that changed Collini from a small boy into a lifelong “case.” In confronting the sins of the fathers, the dead don’t want revenge; they want justice. Then their job is done.—Judy Bloch

In German with English subtitles